1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the delivery of multimedia assets to a user. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and system for personalizing the manner in which the user selects and receives, via a network, stored multimedia assets.
2. Description of the Related Art
An ability to capture, store and transfer multimedia assets has recently grown in importance as businesses and consumers seek to take advantage of every aspect of their computers, televisions and associated networks. For example, where users were able to observe only the news brought to them by their local or national television news or newspapers, Internet users are now able to actively access information from any news source that has an Internet presence. Similarly, satellite television users are capable of receiving far more specialized channels than were available just a few years ago. Moreover, users who were used to merely reading about an event now wish to actually watch video footage of that event.
Unfortunately, the overabundance of information provided by the types and sources of information currently available can often be overwhelming to an individual, and that individual may become incapable of, or uninterested in, sorting through the information for items that he or she finds of interest. Therefore, what is needed is a service or ability to provide a user with only that information which the user will find of interest.
However, even once the user's interests have been identified, it can be difficult to locate and provide media associated with those interests. Particularly in the case of video segments, there is currently no suitable methodology for searching and delivering multimedia assets such that a user may obtain them in a personalized or customizable manner. For example, it is very difficult to apply traditional text-based searching techniques to the finding of a particular video segment from amongst a plurality of video segments. Some conventional services attempt to provide this ability; however, none currently does so in an acceptable manner.
For example, some services store multimedia assets such as video segments and simultaneously provide associated meta-tags for searching those assets. In this way, a particular news broadcast might be tagged as including certain content, such as content relating to the President of the United States. These conventional tagging services are limited in usefulness.
First, such conventional services are not always capable of accurately defining a portion of a video segment that will be of interest to a user, particularly when the meta-tags are not sufficiently detailed. In this example, a news broadcast may be tagged as including content relevant to the President; however, when the user requests that news broadcast, he or she may find that the tagged content deals with the President's tax agenda, whereas the user was seeking information on education reform.
Secondly, even when a broadcast is correctly identified as containing information sought by the user, the user may still be forced to sift through a fairly large amount of information to find the information sought. In the above example, even if a half-hour news broadcast was correctly tagged as containing information about the President's education reform agenda, the user may still have to view or skim virtually the entire broadcast to find that desired clip or segment of information.
Furthermore, even to the extent that conventional services can locate a desired multimedia asset, they are often incapable of both doing the search and thereafter delivering the asset to the user in a manner convenient to the user. That is, typically the user must perform the search himself, choose relevant results and then work to import the chosen assets.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and method for conveniently locating and delivering multimedia assets to a user such that the user receives only the assets (or portions thereof) that he or she desires, and such that the assets are received in an easy-to-use format.